I fell asleep that night with the same sense of useless, sourceless sadness that had been clinging to me for weeks, that made me feel like such a child, curling up around my pillow and not sleeping. Boo hoo, Ellie's sad about her friend. Big deal. Get over it.
I woke up that night with teeth at my neck and adrenaline in my veins and a tremor (and a knife) in my fingers, breathing too hard, half in a nightmare.
I spent the night laughing and shouting and almost crying (But not crying. We weren't that kind of sappy).
I met up with Riley, then I made up with Riley, then I made out with Riley.
It was a little bit awesome.
We both made promises we probably couldn't keep, but we'd been friends for a long time, and we'd made and kept unkeepable promises before. We'd fought before, too, (Not like this, never like this) and it had always worked out fine, and maybe now it would be the same but with kissing and without the military.
Or the fireflies.
We promised each other futures, because we'd given up our own. I didn't know what that future would be, or how we'd get there, but we'd promised, and I have a thing about best friends (Maybe more then friends?) and promises (If you've got them, keep them).
Whatever the future was, I was glad she'd be in it. No matter how teenage it sounded (It sounded really, painfully teenage), I'd missed her really bad, and I kinda needed her.
I didn't need the fireflies. Or the boarding school, or Marlene or any of it, just… her. Her eyes and her soft skin and her warm arms and her sharp smiles and the way she laughed (I sound like such a dumbass adolescent, this is embarrassing).
And I just stood there, kiss growing stale on my lips, feeling young and stupid and butterflies-in-the-stomach nervous, looking her in the eyes, my heart crawling up my throat to take the place my breath occupies.
I don't know how long we'd been standing there in the mall (her mall), listening to trashy dance music (her trashy dance music) and not talking, but I finally force words around the knot in my throat, breaking the anxious silence with
"What do we do now?" It sounds very small and very scared and I almost hate myself for it.
She smiles. "We'll figure it out."
And I smile back and I think she might be right. We've figured it out so far. And this strange sort of comfort wraps around me, like I haven't felt in years, like somehow it's all going to be okay.
And then something shifts, and suddenly it's our mall and our trashy dance music, and the sing-song "I got you"s drift through the air like words neither of us wants to say (too sappy, too soon). Words neither of us needs to say. I understand.
We have each other. And we'll figure it out.